Baseball Executive Needed, Cojones Required

Hire me, Steve!

Another day, another disappointment for the Mets in their search to hire an executive. After lowering their sights to a GM working under Sandy Alderson rather than a President of Baseball Operations, the Mets are still looking to make a hire. Today's news is that former pitcher Chris Young doesn't want to uproot his family from Dallas to New York City. Some people are making a big deal of this, but I don't really care all that much. I don't blame the club for aiming high for a candidate, and I don't think they should settle for anyone they don't really want. At this point they should perhaps consider tabling the whole thing for another year and going forward with the people they already have. But that's up to Alderson and Cohen.

Damn (Yawn) Yankees

If someone can decipher the purpose behind Mike Vaccaro's piece in the New York Post yesterday, I would be grateful if you could share it with me. Vaccaro shared a story from the 1934 season when Giants manager Bill Terry made a dismissive comment about the Dodgers, then in Brooklyn, and it came back to bite the Giants at the end of the season when Brooklyn knocked them out of a pennant chance. Fast forward to today. Apparently, there is some parallel to this because everyone is excited about the Mets, and nobody is talking about the Yankees.

Rebooting the Mets

It was becoming fairly obvious for a while that the Mets weren't going to hire a President of Baseball Operations and a GM, signaled by the lack of interviews with any of the big names they were reportedly pursuing. The Mets made it official Monday when Sandy Alderson what it be known that they had changed course and were only looking for a GM. As it stands now, Sandy Alderson will do the job of president of baseball operations. The Mets will hire a GM to work underneath Alderson, with the goal that within a year or two this person would take over running the baseball operations.

The Myth of the Super Tough Boss

One of the first ways Steve Cohen made his mark as the new Mets owner was with Twitter. He's been funny and remarkably candid, even replying bluntly to stories in the locals he believes are off the mark. There was a story by Joe Pantorno on AMNY.com yesterday citing a source that Mets leadership, including Sandy Alderson, would be on a short leash. To those of us old enough to remember George Steinbrenner's heyday with the Yankees, that does not paint an appealing portrait of what you're looking for from an owner. Not that I freaked out about it — I take anything written by anonymous sources with a huge grain of salt. That's not at all to disparage the writer of the piece, who I'm sure did their job in quoting someone with some familiarity on the matter. It's just that the opinion of any third party is just that, an opinion, not fact.

The Waiting Game

Last week I read that the Mets were going to make a decision on their President of Baseball Operations position within the next week to ten days. It's fairly safe now to assume that this isn't likely to happen within that time frame unless the Mets are prepared to name former Marlins exec Michael Hill, the only person they've interviewed so far, to the position. Clearly, the Mets are operating on a different timetable than was expected, prepared to let Sandy Alderson and the people working under him lay some of the groundwork for the new Mets era. So, while it's a bit surprising that so little has happened up to now, it's not really cause for concern.

Cheaters Gonna Cheat

When the news of Robinson Cano's PED suspension popped up as an alert on my phone yesterday, my first thought was that it was likely to be a good thing for the Mets, at least for 2021. My second thought was f*** Brodie Van Wagenen. Nowhere in those thoughts or any of the thoughts that came later was even an inkling of surprise. This was news that I've been more or less suspected I would hear since Cano bounced back with strong offensive numbers this season.

Pitching Is Serious Business

As we await with bated breath to see if Cleveland's Mike Chernoff is, indeed, the frontrunner for the Mets' head baseball honcho job, I thought I'd take a look at an area where the Mets have to drastically improve to extend their season into October. It's pretty obvious that the Mets will need to make significant upgrades to their starting pitching if they really want to contend in 2021. As it stands right now, their starting rotation consists of Jacob deGrom, Marcus Stroman, David Peterson, and the hopes that Noah Syndergaard can return and be a force sometime into the season. Seth Lugo may also wind up there, I guess, although I thought it was a mistake when the team moved him there during the season. Steven Matz is a complete mystery, and any other starting pitching candidates the Mets have on their roster now look more like depth pieces than viable starters

Mets Still Searching for the Right Leader

Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark had a piece in The Athletic today about the difficulties that the Mets and Phillies are encountering in their respective searches for a truly great candidate to lead their organizations. Teams that already have highly regarded executives are holding onto them, as is the case with the Brewers and David Stearns. Now that Theo Epstein has stepped down from his job with the Cubs, there are sure to be rumors connecting him to the Mets and Phillies jobs. However, Epstein indicates pretty strongly that he's not going to be working for anyone else this year:

To Everything There Is a Season

I mentioned in my post a few days ago that I'm not on the trade for Francisco Lindor bandwagon. It feels kind of lonely where I am because I think if you polled Mets fans the vast majority would be in favor of this move. The idea, and it certainly has merit, is that Lindor is an absolute superstar available in his prime, much like when the Dodgers acquired Mookie Betts from the Red Sox. Lindor just turned 27 a couple of days ago, so the idea of trading for him and then signing him to a multi-year contract is much more appealing than your typical free agent signing, where most players are 30 or even a bit older.

The Ponies Rumble Onward

Somewhat lost among all of the other news from this week's Cohen/Alderson press conference was the news of which four teams would still be New York Mets affiliates going forward. If you missed it, the ones staying on are Syracuse, Binghamton, Brooklyn, and St. Lucie. This was especially good news for Binghamton, which earlier this year had been listed as a team likely to lose their affiliation. As I wrote a while back, the Mets' relationship with the city in south-central New York state stretches back almost 30 years.